Crazy Old Woman

There once was a crazy old woman who had lived right near my house. Her backyard faced mine and sometime I would sit out there to read or something like that, but if she was out I would watch her out of the corner of my eye to see what she was doing.

She had an empty fish tank out there full of houseflies. When one died she would take it out, bury it, stick a little toothpick in the ground as its gravestone, and then she would write its name on a strip of paper and stick it in the slot at the top of her cardboard box memorial.

She had a husband once, but he went off somewhere one day and never came back. She was expecting a child at the time and everyone in the town who had known had said that they would aid her in raising it and whenever she needed anything that they would be the first ones running at her door to help. No one followed up on their promises.

She had a beautiful baby boy. I went over to ask her one day what she had named it and the crazy old woman had said that wasn't going to name him until he was twenty one. That way, he couldn't leave her before then unless he truly wanted one.

And so they lived like that. She had 'lost' her last name once her husband left so the poor little boy lived for the longest time with no way to identify himself whatsoever.

But on his twenty first birthday, she fulfilled her promise. They both stood near the cardboard box memorial and the houseflies' graves and the crazy old woman shouted her son's new name as loud as she could.

And the very next day he died.

The whole town went to his funeral with their black little umbrellas and mourned for him without shedding one tear. I went to the crazy old woman to talk to her for a while and assure her everything was alright. She didn't give me the chance to speak though. She told me that she knew that her son would leave her as soon as he got his name. Her fingers tightened a little on her red umbrella and with a firm resolve she stated that she was going to start over again. She said she would lose her name for a while, change it, and everything would be different.

She then marched over to her cardboard box memorial, wrote her son's name on the strip of paper, and more lovingly then I've ever seen anyone do anything, place it into the slot at the top of the box. She then stuck two little toothpicks in the ground and told us all to remember her and her son.

She toddled off towards her car, red umbrella still in hand, and drove off, leaving us all to mourn without tears for her son that we never even really knew or cared for. We never saw the crazy old woman again.